Saturday 30 January 2016

Sick economics


The Oxfam Report of 18 January this year shows that the wealth of the poorest half of the world's population - that's 3.6 billion people - has fallen by a trillion dollars since 2010. This 38 per cent drop since 2010 has occurred despite the global population increasing by around 400 million people during that period. Meanwhile the wealth of the richest 62 has increased by more than half a trillion dollars to $1.76 trillion. In 2010 it took 388 rich people to own more than half the wealth of the world. The rest have not lost any money, but today it takes only 62 of them to reach that milestone. Just nine of the 62 are women.

The same report states that globally the richest 1% now has as much wealth as the rest of the world combined. This position has been reached even though the world has gone through a deep recession

The UK’s richest 1,000 families control wealth of about £547 billion. This has more than doubled during the last decade. One-third or even one-quarter of their wealth would end the austerity programme championed George Osborne and many others across Westminster.  Yet the super rich standard's of living would barely be touched by such a transfer.

Wealth always dominates opportunity and power. It enables the wealthy to fund governments, political parties, fund elections, own media, fund culture and ideas and relentlessly advance their economic interests.

The strengthening of an untouchable, worldwide, super-rich is the main achievement in the last decade of the economic, social and political system that the rest of the world labours under.

Tuesday 26 January 2016

The EU - what to do?

Of course there should be a United European Federation, with a common market and equitable living standards, a common currency, a progressive international policy and the ability to call together armed forces to defend itself.

Global questions necessitate at least continental answers. World poverty; imperialism and the international repercussions of war leading to the mass movement of whole peoples, famine, global warming, the meretricious, criminal, utterly self seeking behaviors of the super wealthy and their control of the banks, the corporations and the world's capital, all of it and more, requires at least a continental wide response.

All this is absolutely and objectively obvious but, it might be argued, fatally abstract. After all, look at the main obstacles in the way of progress towards a European Continental Federation based on meeting the concerns listed above! Front and centre is the current EU itself, its apparatus, leadership, its policy and structure and the totally compromised political and financial class that holds the stinking edifice up. Then there are the proto-reactionary nationalist movements and parties in individual European countries that recognise the weakness of the current EU but who promote the entirely utopian and reactionary view that individual nations can somehow isolate themselves from the worse effects of the predominant global social and economic system of late, rapacious capitalism. The idea that any version of the current EU structure, or, alternatively, the 'winning back' of some sort of spurious national independence from Europe can open up the possibility of the Europe that the mass of Europeans, not to say the rest of the world need, is simply absurd.

It is therefore not that the goal of a united Europe based on an alternative to the tail end of a vicious, out of date and poisonous social system that is abstract - in the classic sense that it has no connection to real life -  on the contrary such a Europe was never more required. Rather it is the utterly abstract ideas that either the reform of Europe's current structure or simply that falling back into the nation state, have ever offered any sort of means to get there that are the abstractions, that are completely remote from real life. Of course there will be EU reforms and, conversely national upheavals on the way to the united Europe that is needed. But without the goal of an utterly different united Europe, committed to a social transformation, in this epoch solely nationally based efforts in that direction will all fail and all die with horrible consequences and in short order.

It is the question: should we get out or should we stay in the EU that is, today, the most dangerous abstraction. In Britain, the ruling Tory party have launched a referendum along those lines. The Tory leaders' goal is to try and re-cement the party's social and political base. And despite the new right, represented by UKIP with its 4 million votes in the last General Election, claiming that the referendum vote is the most important vote that the British will have in 'in their lifetimes', in reality either outcome will change very little. The core of the current Europe, the Eurozone, is already without Britain. And in Britain itself the economic dominance of 'the City of London' and the big international corporations remains untouched.

Most of the new left in mainland Europe are still struggling with the idea that the EU as it stands cannot be reformed. The treatment of Syriza and Greece was a sharp lesson in that regard. Even Podemos in Spain, which has argued in the past that it will win the reforms that the Spanish people need from the EU because of the larger weight of Spain, is reviewing its approach to the EU's structure. Europe's new left were already committed to an international view of their struggle, which was one reason offered why a section of the old Syriza leadership made the potentially disastrous decision not to launch their own currency when threatened over debt. It is a paradox but nevertheless an essential paradox to grasp as Greece shows, that while there is certainly no road for any single European nation to get to a socialist society on its own, the route to a socialist Europe may pass through nationally based initiatives which then can become a centre of an alternative to the existing European structures.

To get away from the abstraction, 'inside or outside the EU' and instead to begin to develop the real transitional measures towards a genuinely progressive Europe, an 'alternative' Europe has to be built. In the intense revolutionary days of 1905 and 1917 Russia, soviets or councils were directly established by soldiers, workers, peasants and their parties, which grew in their popular legitimacy and created a dual power in Russian society. Many practical steps have been taken by different sections of the new left in Europe to build initiatives that echo the idea of a popular alternative to the rigmarole of Europe's current proto-state structures. Today, with huge left surges into mainstream political life and even government in Greece, Spain and Portugal, with projected left developments in Ireland and a new mass Labour party with left leadership in the UK, there are new and much more prominent platforms to begin the construction of an alternative Europe. This might start with a European debt conference, focused initially on Greece who have called for it and which issues a new programme to the whole of Europe for fair and progressive debt relief. We shall then see how the popular legitimacy of such measures contrasts with that garnered by the decaying institutions of the current EU as the left begins its work towards a popular new European Constitution.

And the British referendum? It is not a turning point for Britain's future. It is not a new 1975 and has much more in common with a second 2011. It is a vote preeminently about local concerns and British politics. British voters afraid or appalled at the prospects of more immigrants will vote 'no'. And most left or progressively minded people (with the exception of those influenced by the politics of the 'British Road to Socialism' and the British Communist Party) will probably vote to stay in the EU in order to prevent what would, and will, be seen as a racist (and not an anti-capitalist) victory. What matters is what happens before and after the ballot.

Saturday 23 January 2016

British referendum

A short essay on Britain's Referenda

Two referenda in the UK, the first deciding on Scottish Independence in 2014 and the next on membership of the EU, focus like cross hairs in a telescopic sight, picking out the vulnerabilities of Britain's political system.

Referenda are a novelty in British politics.

In 1975, Labour leader, Prime Minister Harold Wilson, launched what he called 'the solemn referendum.' It was the first in British political history. Then as now its main purpose appeared to be the need to deal with a short term political split in one of the two main, Westminster parties; in Wilson's case the Labour Party. In 1975 the question was whether Britain should be part of 'the European Common Market'.

The British economy was in a mess in 1975. Then, as now, big capital was on an investment strike (although in those days most companies paid their taxes). Then as now Britain's productivity was therefore the lowest of all the leading countries in the West. The main establishment argument as to why Britain was in such an economic state in 1975 was the political claim that an over-powerful working class and their mass trade unions poisoned the prospects of growth. That assertion is now unavailable to the new - old Etonians, whose parents dedicated themselves to the destruction of Britain's labour and trade union movement.

The entitled sons and daughters of the next generation often still try on the trade union union bogey for size, but now it is used to politically influence the 4 million plus who are forced to 'work for themselves', or the 5 million plus without permanent contracts, in an attempt to galvanise them rightwards by claiming union members have special privileges. That is what Chancellor George Osborne means when he talks about his future Tory Party being the party of 'workers and strivers.' But with the odd exception of over-enthusiastic toadies like Business Secretary Sajid Javid, nobody in ruling circles really believes anymore that the unions are a problem for Britain's economy. However as the unions' hardened remnants are now emerging as a deeply serious political factor in the opposition to austerity and war (see UNITE's support for the Peoples Assembly and union backing for Corbyn) our rulers believe that now is the time for the final demise of organised labour.

In any case the real problem in 1975 was not at all a Labour Party split or 'overmighty union bosses', but rather that the membership of the European Market was another major adjustment for Britain away from Empire and its lingering Commonwealth shadow. It was a big a symbol of the end of a certain sort of Britain, just as the Attlee Government's withdrawal from India at the end of WW2, and Wilson's withdrawal of all British military 'East of Suez' in 1967/68 had been. (See Saki Dockrill, Britain's Retreat From East of Suez, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, which analyses all the relevant released government documents from the period.)

In other words, behind the referendum in 1975 stood the requirement for British capitalism to make an historic shift out of the remains of Empire and, while saving as much as possible from that era, particularly its global finance industry, then grab what benefits it could from Europe's growing success. These benefits for British capitalism were seen as springing from a projected alliance with the growing industrial might of Germany (for the foreseeable future without, in the view of London, a wise and credible international political and financial leadership that the UK could provide) in collaboration with the US - and against France.

The 1975 referendum was the political means by which the British ruling class consolidated a decisive turn from its past. Most significantly, its long term, established political apparatus, including two major parties and a stable political system, could not, by itself, deliver the required result. The referendum was an unprecedented step. Such decisive shifts before 1975, to go to war, to annex overseas territories, to join international organisations like NATO or the UN required no such political novelty. Indeed, in most cases such decisions did not even require much in the way of direct parliamentary activity. 1975 was the first time in the 20th century that Britain's long term, stable, unshakable political stability faced a strategic failure. Its system could no longer be trusted to deliver on a key cause at a decisive moment. It was not to be the last.

The referendum on voting systems held in 2011 turned into the first of what was to become a series of political routs for the Liberals as a result of their support for the Tories in a coalition government. Even then most commentators wrote that the issue of fair votes would have to return. The 2011 referendum solved nothing except in its prediction of the demise of the Liberal Democrats.

The two referendum questions raised most recently, first in Scotland and now on EU membership, have also had to go beyond the confines of Britain's traditional political system. And this is despite the fact that the latter, a decision on EU membership, carries nothing like the historic content of the first time round. In other words, Britain's 'normal' political machinery is getting weaker and even the three referendums this decade have not 'solved' and look unlikely to 'solve' the questions that they raised and will raise over the EU. On the contrary, so far, two out of the three have simply opened the door to a wider and deeper debate.

History repeats itself. The Scottish question, regardless of the 2014 result, is opening a new stage in British politics and continues to be of immense significance to Britain's future. But the second EU referendum is more reminiscent of Marx's epithet
'once as tragedy; once as farce...'

The Tory spilt on the EU certainly has echoes of Wilson's party problems in 1975. But this time it is much more than echoes we hear. This is the real thing. It is the modern Tory split itself, and not any potentially great movement in the political economy of Britain, which is the main and critical focus of the next EU referendum vote. Britain's political crisis has taken another lurch away from its much praised stability, not just by its requirement for a referendum as such, but also to deal with the threat to Britain's main party of government. Why? Because Britain's political crisis (and therefore the coming EU referendum) has finally come home to the absolute centre of its traditional political leadership, in the shape of the woeful political condition of Britain's modern Tory party.

Although the UK Independence Party (UKIP) scored 4 million votes in the May 2014 General Election it ended up with one MP and a busted leadership. But the political bloc that UKIP has created in British society remains largely intact. That bloc is represented in both main classes in society. Labour has immense problems, created largely out of decades of spineless pandering to chauvinist and racist moods and support for the war mongering that has given rise to the refugee problem. But as both Scotland and Wales show, there is nothing inevitable about these divisions inside the working classes. They are, ultimately, not based on material foundations. However there have been gigantic changes among 'small and medium enterprise' owners and the wealthy. The split in the ruling classes is seismic - right across the Western world and in the BRIC countries. The modern ruling class has become semi-detached from their national roots (with the partial exceptions of China and the USA.) The head of 'Britain's' largest investment company and the ninth largest in the world, Aberdeen Asset Management, recently opined that whether Britain stayed in or went out of the EU was of no material consequence to him or his company.

Large-scale manufacturing in Britain is largely a product of foreign investment (eg Cars and Steel) and the industrial sector, both small and large, sees the European market as central to its exports. In 1948, British industry (including manufacturing, oil and gas extraction, and utilities) accounted for 41% of the British economy. By 2013, it was just 14%. At the same time the services sector's share of the economy has risen from 46% to 79%. The UK manufacturing industry has declined at the fastest pace of the G7 economies; resulting in the UK moving from having one of the largest shares in 1948 to the lowest in 2012. (ONS statistics April 2014.) This sector expressed in ruling class politics, mainly inside the Tory Party, has had the smallest voice for years.

Now there is a genuine shift. The most dynamic and richest part of Britain's ruling class are sailing off into the global stratosphere (or the Caymen Islands) and are essentially unmoved by Britain's membership of the EU either way. The Tory Party's most traditional and patrician centre is now alarmed by Britain's unbalanced economy and its increasing distance from the country's political management and therefore sincerely believes that the answer lies in more foreign investment to rebuild a firmly UK based industrial sector (albeit ultimately owned by the Japanese, the Chinese and the Indians.) Although such investment depends on open access to the EU for exports, its sources are plainly outside. Under the strain created by the flight of British wealth from its national allegiances, and the Tory turn to non EU reservoirs of wealth to rebuild a British economy, the traditional social bloc that has underpinned Tory dominance in mainstream politics in the UK for decades - is falling apart. And while being inside or outside the EU does not resolve any of this, it has become the symbol of what a large swathe of traditional Tory support regards as the key to the future.

This Tory bloc includes those who are alarmed by the rights of EU workers and their competition in the UK; many of the SME who, like most of Britain's economy, are concentrated in the service sector and who need foreign tourists from the US and China and no 'regulations' from the EU. They hate and envy the grand corporations who get away with paying no tax. And, increasingly, they regard the Tory centre as just as remote as the head of Aberdeen Asset Management. The desertion of a key sector Britain's traditional ruling class has rocked the keystone in the Tory Party's social edifice. The most powerful part, economically speaking, of Britain's ruling class has literally deserted their post.

The Tory vote, as with Labour, has been in decline since the 1970s, but its essential core has not, up to now, fractured. That is exactly what threatens in the coming EU referendum - and for all of Prime Minister Cameron's palliative efforts, the outcome of the vote will also fail to resolve the Tory's future because it does not address the economic and social disintegration of Britain's traditional ruling class.

Neither of the two new referendums therefore solve Britain's chronic political crisis. Indeed, over time and given their confluence, they are likely to make it worse.  Already the Scottish National Party, the current government of Scotland, has raised the problem of a likely 'yes' vote in Scotland approving EU membership, when and if England vote 'no'. SNP leaders have suggested that would provoke the immediate requirement for a new Scottish referendum on independence. Even if England also votes to remain in the EU, should there be a substantial difference in the vote across Britain's nations, Scotland's distinct opinion will again reinforce the argument to rerun the Independence vote. Labour's loss of northern votes to UKIP and its isolation in the south outside London reinforces Scottish political feelings that the only way to get the sort of country they want is to break the ties with Westminster.

Tied to this 'gordonian knot' is of course the fate of the British Labour Party. It is obvious that Scottish voters voted overwhelmingly for the SNP to represent them in Westminster last May because they believed that Labour could not effectively represent them in a British Parliament. They voted SNP for Westminster despite their differences on independence. In the May elections this year we will see the impact of the new Corbyn led Labour Party both inside Scottish Labour (which is still led by a Blairite) and among Scottish voters. (Scottish Labour is starting from such a dreadful position that they can hardly do any worse.) But even if the Corbyn factor strengthens the Labour vote in Scotland, it is unlikely that in the short term Scotland will shift back to Labour, because while government is from Westminster, Scots do not believe Labour can win southern England and Scottish votes for Labour in the context of a Westminster Parliament would therefore be wasted.

The effects of the Scottish referendum, despite its 10% majority for the 'no' camp, cannot be squeezed back into the 'traditional' political bottle. And the coming EU referendum will reinforce that fact.

Equally disheartening for those in Britain who would like their politics 'to get back to normal' the EU economic social and political crisis is itself heading towards 'Accident and Emergency.' That question belongs to a separate blog.

In other words, and despite the two British referenda being designed to cover over the weaknesses of Britain's standing political system and its main parties, they will not even solve the problems that were designed to settle and neither will their results create a 'return to normal' in their wake. Scottish independence is not going away any time soon. Neither will the vote on EU membership settle Britain's political and economic future in or out of Europe. We have already seen how the Scottish referendum on independence has opened, not closed, a Pandora's box. And whatever the result on the EU vote, Britain is inexorably joining the destabilised politics of most of the main European nations.

There are also new political forces and patterns are emerging from this 'shaking of the kaleidoscope.' Labour's Corbyn leadership is the first mainstream political example of these changes - as tens of thousands emerging from a new left, created by the movement against austerity and war, took the opportunity to fill the empty structures of the old Labour Party and vote for a left leader. The emerging battle in the Labour Party opens the door to 'new politics' in the sense of the possibility of new parties, new economics, a new view on war and nukes and new voting systems to get there. Paradoxically, should Scottish Labour take the bold step of separating from its English connexion while adopting the Corbyn political outlook - substantially to the left of the SNP - it would have a much greater chance of winning Holyrood, the Scottish parliament. In any case an independent Scottish parliament would open the door to Britain's first left socialist government. There is already a huge mass movement against austerity and war which, should the real 'new politics' fully emerge, and provide the instruments and vehicles needed for the movement to find its political expression in the mainstream, add to its causes the right for a new  political system that can burst out of the compromised shambles that characterises most of political life and embrace the real problems facing Britain and its nations' futures.

The old political system cannot contain, let alone resolve, the problems of a modern British capitalist society, but nor does it have its historic strength or cunning to destroy the new politics; the politics of a root and branch alternative.

Next; what should the left in Britain do about the EU?

Saturday 9 January 2016

Cologne - shows what?

When Rosa Luxemburg coined the phrase
'Socialism or Barbarism'
she was looking at the world through the bloodstained lenses of WW1, focusing on a tidal wave of death and destruction. But she was aware that barbarism is not just the collapse of a previously prevailing society. Depending on the strength, or lack of it, of those classes and parties with a progressive alternative, it can also describe the abject detritus initially spun off from the convulsions of the world, which then sweep into the centre of the vacuum created by the absence of an alternative and thereby become the concrete form of the new barbarism. 

Socialism is not the victory of the new world, it is an announcement that the struggle for a different society has been born. Equally, barbarism is not the end of an old civilisation, it is the congealing of its waste and rot - now brought into its decaying centre.

Rosa Luxemburg saw, fought and the best guess would be was finally murdered by young men who had returned from the German front. In their anger and despair and trauma, they had been organised by early fascists into the Friecorp - a wild militarised band that raped and murdered its way to the New Order.

So far a million of the estimated 4 million refugees whose lives have been destroyed by the Syrian war have swept into Germany. Some hundreds of alienated, trauma ridden, disassociated young men in Cologne and perhaps a couple of thousand across other cities in Germany, went on a gang-based spree of sex attacks and theft. This is a taste of barbarity. It is what an endless and cruel war looks like even 500 miles from its source.

There may be specific conditions, yet to be discovered, for the events in Cologne and wider on New Year's night. There are always particular and specific structures surrounding even the most nihilistic and apparently mindless large-scale behaviour. Such widespread actions are never just the product of a vague ideological or cultural background, however shared. There must, for example, have been elements of social media prompting.

Perhaps particular religious or criminal groups or individuals encouraged this version of 'defiance' among the young North African and Syrian men. Certainly ISIS has up to now seen the Syrian camps in Turkey and in Lebanon as their potential recruiting ground and the promotion of alienation and antagonism to western European social mores, targeted at its apparently vulnerable and available people on the evening of a public holiday, would be a natural extension of such organising.

At this stage it is impossible to say.

What is certain is that the far right, and the not so far right, will propose that the barbarism exhibited in Cologn and elsewhere eminated from Germany's acceptance of refugees - when the truth is the exact opposite.

Certainly a thousand or more extra mysoginstic young men in Germany must be taught that they will meet a severe legal response for such actions. And a movement, led by refugee women, supported by all, as there are none so fit to break the chains as those who wear them, needs to completely and utterly isolate and denounce such behaviour on the streets, in the camps and in the public squares. But the acceptance by relatively rich western countries of the new millions who are trying to escape from the barbarism in their cities and homes can only massively reduce the growing appeal of those who would want to organise trauma and despair into a truely mass force for reaction.

Whatever the political weakness of the Palestine Liberation Organisation in its acceptance of office to end up trapped between Israeli military might and hand outs from the West, its work over decades, even despite its failed direct actions across the globe, especially in the Palestinian camps, kept a people together in hope, which was a major benefit to the rest of the world.

Today, despite some real advances (for example various Kurdish initiatives at both a state and a military level) no such generally hegemonic force exists in the Syrian and Sudanese diaspora. Western war mongering, sometimes direct, sometimes through its allies, has destroyed for the foreseable future any chance for an Arab based solution to the long agony of the Middle East.  The removal, today of the Wests' bombers, their special forces, their immense economic leaverage, are essential preconditions for the emergence of any general progressive movements. The sole Western action today (tomorrow a new Marshal Plan etc., will be called for) that has any chance of reducing the millions who are the victims of chaos and brutality, of avoiding the genuinely mass, continental, emergence of a new barbarism, is bending every effort to stop the war and ensuring an open door policy to refugees. 

Thursday 7 January 2016

Corbyn's reshuffle and Britain's political crisis.

Many stupid things have been said and written about Corbyn's Parliamentary Labour Party opposition (or shadow) cabinet reshuffle (January 4 - 6.) The most absurd comments have come from commentators like the Blair-supporting Labour Lord Mandelson and the right wing Telegraph newspaper, claiming that Corbyn's reshuffle has been a left purge;

'For the hard-left Labour activists who brought Corbyn to power, this is a belated Christmas present: their man is delivering on their terrifying agenda, and in turn they are helping to recruit a steady flow of new, radical and often London-based members.' (Allister Heath, Telegraph 6, January.) The Telegraph is very dubious of all things 'metropolitan.'

Besides his coup in creating a 'hard left' junta, Corbyn is simultaneously accused of a savage attack on Labour's traditional 'broad church', the overturn of his previous statements about 'a new type of politics, and the most incompetent and half-hearted reorganisation of a shadow cabinet since .. whenever. Corbyn is plainly too bolshevik - and not bolshevik enough!

There are sensible and factual accounts of Corbyn's reshuffle available (although not many in the mainstream British media.) But it is worthwhile stepping back to look at what happened in the reorganisation of Labours' main spokespeople in Parliament in the wider context of Britain's deepening political crisis. It demonstrates how new political realities force their way into what was private and hallowed ground. And the first thing to note is that explanations offered by some of Corbyn's allies, that surely the new Labour leader is only doing the things that Blair and Brown did, without any of the accompanying pandemonium that has been visited on on Corbyn's head, may be empirically true but almost entirely misses the point.

First; why has Corbyn's reshuffle looked more like a prolonged negotiation than a 'night of the long knives?'

Because it was a negotiation. Jeremy Corbyn is a nice man but his humanity was not what held up the changes he wished to make. The fundamental fact was - that he was in a negotiation - between at least two proto parties whether he started from that assumption or not. The bulk of the parliamentary Labour Party oppose the Corbyn leadership - but that means little. By the end Blair was almost universally hated among his own MPs and Brown from the beginning. The Labour MPs who want, seek and are organising for the demise of Corbyn also hate his politics, also believe he has no chance of getting a right wing 'aspirant' county to vote them into office and thereby create the substantial political life that they have lusted after since university. They are not 'in' the Corbyn party. They believe that 'their' party (and their potential future) has been hi-jacked.

In a deeper sense it was a negotiation because negotiation will become the general and indispensable mechanism to deal with the new representations bursting through Britain's decaying political system and even into its parliament, as the breaking down of Britain's traditional political parties, which no longer coral even a half of two thirds of Britain's potential voters, are increasingly unable to maintain the pretence that they represent the British people. Corbyn's victory in the Labour Party leadership elections is a case in point. A new left emerged in the country in the wake of Blair and Iraq, in the wake of austerity and of the changes in Scotland. Some of it was 'old Labour'. Most of it was 'new activists.' Nothing represented them in Parliament and they were given the opportunity, because the Labour Party was collapsing in the country, to vote for Labour's leader. They have created a new party. This new party, a genuinely left social democratic party, is now in (painful) negotiations with a different party, a party that has broken from its historic base in the working class and adopted managerial capitalism as its direction. Before the new party is finished it will need to open negotiations with the Greens, the left of the SNP, with Sinn Fein and Plaid Cymry too - if it survives; if it manages to build on and then stand on a growing mass movement in the country.

So it is not helpful for anybody's political clarity to claim that this is all 'business as usual' for the Labour Party and to suggest that Labour will ride all these troubles out as it gradually returns to its traditional role in the two party seesaw.

Second; a great moment in Britain's political history has been achieved from the perhaps unexpected source of Corbyn's reshuffle.

A major party in Britain now has a leader and a defence minister who oppose Britain's nuclear weapon, Trident, from being renewed. North Korea's recent nuclear 'test' will naturally be the next reason given why Labour's new leadership on this issue is 'crazy' (as though North Korea will take into account Britain's 'independent' nuclear response before launching its missiles.) But the significant point is that Trident is almost the definition of Britain's desired place in the world (at least in the City of London, in the 'grand' universities and public schools, down Whitehall, in the clubs along St James's and the boardroom of the multinationals, especially of the arms and aviation industries. Not to mention the foundation of the Britain's bridge across the Atlantic and its place in the UN.)

Trident is a cornerstone of the how Britain's rulers rule, nationally and internationally. Britain would have to be a different sort of country without it.

Everything in Britain's traditional and establishment politics will be mobilised to stop any party coming into a position to end Trident or its equivalent. Some of that gathering force will be Labour MPs. And a great alliance, inside and outside parliament, across all the countries and anti-nuclear parties of Britain, will need to be created to win that battle. That is another item that Corbyn's reshuffle has put on the table. That is another new part of Britain's political crisis.

Next; What will happen to the Tories?